Source Code Review

Wed Apr 6, 2011

Warning: this is not a movie for angry nerds. If you ponder over the concepts of multiple dimensions and consciousness and that sort of esoteric stuff more deeply, the purist in you will start to bristle. And don’t even start to go down the road of analyzing why a movie called Source Code has nothing to do with late nights coding in C+ at your Linux box. That said, this movie is such a wild romp through quasi-temporal what-ifs that you’ll soon forget these half-baked concepts.

Source Code is basically Groundhog Day on acid, except instead of Bill Murray, we have Russel Peters. Yes, you heard me, Russel “Somebody’s-gonna-get-hurt-real-bad” Peters has an excellent cameo in this flick. But the hero leading the charge through all the deja-vu moments is aptly played by Jake Gyllenhall, whose portrayal of a desperate soldier is wonderfully tempered with a bumbling humanistic quality.

I love movies in the vein of The Butterfly Effect and Momentum, so Source Code had me at “multiple dimensions” (although, as the inventor of the Source Code emphatically iterates: It’s not time travel, it’s time re-assignment). The director’s previous effort, Moon, was also a mind-bending look at an individual isolated by bizarre circumstances and trying to find out the truth of it all. I’d say he injected more adrenaline into this effort and has come up with a snappy and engaging thriller that is a must-see. Oh, and I loved the ending.